Light in Darkness

Matthew 2:13-23

This weekend some of us were on a confirmation retreat. We talked about theology – which is just a fancy word for asking, What is going on here? Or, in LNPC speak, Who is this God and what is God up to? And, What is a good life and how do we live it?

 

But these questions are not just hypothetical and theoretical. They come out of real situations where life is turned upside down, that make asking them a pressing need. All throughout scripture and church history, we read, an extraordinary experience would happen that would shake things up so much that just going on as usual would not work anymore.

In these moments the people who seek to point their lives toward God, and goodness, and hope, come together and ask, what is going on here? How do we make sense of this? Where is God in this and how should we live as a result? 

Specifically, on our retreat we named some of things that send us seeking, like uncertainty, suffering, fear, helplessness and injustice, and these words too are not just hypothetical or theoretical, because another word for injustice is when your best friend can’t come to school for fear for his safety, but you still can go anywhere you want.

 

A wise person said to me this week, “There are two sides to the Christmas story. One, the coming of the light and two, embracing the dark, for God’s presence is there also.” We like to tell the Christmas story in the coming of the light way. But the story itself has the darkness part too, and that too must be embraced if we are looking for the presence of God.

 

After Jesus was born, Mary and Joseph stayed on in Bethlehem. They settled in to make a life and raise this child among extended family and neighbors they’d come to know, near the shepherds who must’ve been like a collection of uncles to Jesus by now, not too far from Aunt Elizabeth, Uncle Zechariah and baby John, learning to talk and walk to walk together, perhaps. Life might have just begun to feel a little normal, (whatever that is when you’re raising the Messiah), when the bubble is popped by majestic and exotic visitors from afar descending into their town. 

They give Mary and Joseph gifts, not only gold, frankincense and myrrh, but also their far away and deeper insight that God has come for the whole world, and everyone in it belongs to this story and this story belongs to everyone in it, by embodying their own story of God telling them what God is up to and how they’re shaping their lives around it.  And then together, they’re all doing theology – asking now what? How do we make sense of all this now?

 

Eventually they say their affectionate goodbyes and the Magi are on their way, when an angel messenger invades Joseph’s dreams again, like happened three years ago when he was told not to be afraid to take Mary as his wife, and says, Right now, take your family to Egypt. It’s not safe here, Go!

And from one moment to the next this little family goes from being settled to unsettled, certain to uncertain, from hosting strangers from a foreign land to being strangers in a foreign land. 

 

This time they’re not going to a home town of Joseph’s ancestors where they have friends and relatives like they did when they moved to Bethlehem, they’re going to the far reaches of the vast Roman Empire where they know nobody, and don’t share the same customs or even speak the same language.  From a life comfortable and familiar they are thrust into to absolute uprootedness. 

 

But, when they arrive, people there take them in and give them safety and welcome, hospitality and care. Why? Because strangers are really siblings in the human family, because we all belong to God and each other. And this truth must become deeply embedded and embodied in the human life of our Lord and savior in order for it to mean anything in our own human lives. Jesus is right here when we are with and for one another. 

(By the way, it doesn’t even settle down when the ego-maniac leader dies. The holy family returns to Bethlehem but Herod’s son is in charge there and so it’s still not safe, and only then, when Jesus is like a first-grader, do they finally go back to Nazareth, where their ordinary lives were first interrupted by God’s declaration of coming in to share this life with us all). 

 

Meanwhile, many families did not escape the violence and horror brought down upon Bethlehem because of Herod’s fragile ego and fear of losing his power. Darkness is real. Evil is evil, and we participate. Human beings are capable of great cruelty and brutality. Human beings are capable of profound compassion and courage.  Both are true, and it is in the darkness that we discover so. 

We can’t depend on the greatness of human beings to save us.  We are cruel and kind, brave and cowardly, right-intentioned and off base, all of us. Let’s be honest, we haven’t the stamina or attention spans to be the source of real transformation, not to mention our terrible tendency to turn each other into enemies and vent our sorrow and anger at evil in one another’s faces and to one another’s destruction. If saving the world and each other is up to us, we are doomed.

 

Almost two weeks ago I was in Assisi, standing on a foggy mountainside learning about St. Francis in the early 1200s, who started out life a spoiled rich kid, but gave up everything he owned to serve his fellow human beings and live close to the earth, because Jesus spoke to him and awakened him to the profound reality that rather than reaching for God and striving for a good life, this whole world is held by God and every person and creature in it is already completely loved by God, and so is meant to be loved and cared for by us. Our lives are not our own, they are for one another. And other people’s lives are not none of our business, we are here to care for each other. And this earth is not to be taken for granted, it is the home God has given us all to share, and brother sun and sister moon and the rabbits and the birds and the people behaving badly and the people in need of help are all ours and we are theirs, and everything and everyone belongs, and this is not hypothetical or theoretical. 

 

The darkness we are living through right now is real and tangible and can’t be ignored and makes it impossible to keep living as usual.  But we recognize that where there is darkness, the God who comes in is here, Jesus is here, Jesus who came into death to bring us life, and is doing so even right now, inside the real encounters and between regular, human lives. In the middle of despair, uncertainty, fear, suffering, helplessness and injustice, are people embracing each other with compassion and care, hospitality and welcome, experiences that shake us up with hope, and strangers discovering we belong to each other because we’re all really siblings in this human family. 

 

Evil is real and not to be trifled with. But its strength is in fear, and it can not prevail over love that leaks in and rises up and persists, and one day will be the totality and the fullness of life for all, because love comes from God and returns to God taking everyone and everything into its healing hold. The tastes and glimpses of this we experience now come when we surrender our lives into God’s hands, and we find ourselves praying with St. Francis, “make me an instrument of your peace, where there is hatred let me sow love.” 

I could list examples of this Kingdom of God light in the darkness, but all week long you all have been proclaiming the gospel to me, and any stories of hope or trust I would share today are coming from your lives, and moments in your neighborhoods and schools. 

So it feels like what we need right now is to do some theology together—not hypothetical and theoretical, but simply to ponder with all the saints, What is happening? Where is God in this? And how are our lives being shaped in response? 

So I am going to open up the space for ‘Kingdom of God sightings,’ so we can do the work of the church, and share where we have seen God at work, and where we have participated in the Kingdom of God as it is unfolding among us. 

 

(We passed the mic and stories included teachers driving kids home who don't have a safe ride, grandparents in traffic vests walking school grounds all day, a church paying the rent of their neighbor’s temporarily closed business, a middle school kid’s story about interpreting the events of the day with each another during a special assembly, seeing someone at a frigid protest give her down mittens to stranger with flimsy gloves, switching around carpools to protect Somali parents, messages of solidarity from other states and countries and across political spectrum, etc.)

Calloused Hope

Devotion for Being Apart -
July 17

This summer, I will share new devotions from time to time,
and invite you to browse through devotions that have been posted on this blog.

I heard a couple weeks ago that while Japan has reopened some theme parks, to help prevent the spread of Covid-19, screaming on roller coasters is outlawed. Signs at the parks now say, "Please scream inside your heart."  Someone shared this news on Twitter with the comment, "After 6 months, 2020 finally has a slogan."

Please scream inside your heart.

From time to time this comes back to me and I like it, because I feel like that's what I am doing, and it makes me smile to be given permission - nay, encouragement - for this activity.

We are not off this roller coaster any time soon, so please scream inside your heart.

Also feels true: Screaming in each other's faces could spread infection, so please scream alone and quietly. That message I am actively resisting.  We need people to scream with. Even virtually.

But of course the whole thing breaks down as an analogy pretty quickly. Nobody chose to get on this roller coaster, and certainly none of us is here because we think this is fun.

When I was first starting out in ordained ministry, I was part of a group of new pastors assembled by the wise and gentle Rev. Cal Cooper, a retired minister who would convene us monthly to share lunch and support.  One thing he was insistent on: you must have something on the calendar to look forward to.  Each month he would go around the table and ask us what ours was. It didn't have to be huge, or even soon, but some trip, some adventure, some plan that tickled our fancy, something outside the regular pattern should be shimmering out there in our near future.

I am remembering the wisdom of that advice this week. It goes deeper than I realized at the time. Having something to look forward to helps us remain present right here and now. It somehow anchors us.  In my house, in the past five months, we have had only the opposite, as plan after plan has dropped off the calendar and fallen into the abyss.

 But suddenly we have a few things on the calendar: god-willing and if all stays stable, the kids are quarantining in preparation for (highly-adapted, bubbled-up, masked and socially-distanced) camp next week, and while they are there I will lead a silent retreat for tired pastors, each tucked into our own cottage for a few days of prayer and rest.  Then in mid-August, my family will spend five greatly-anticipated days in a cabin on the Gunflint Trail.  This is the one we've buckled our anticipation to most.  My daughter keeps asking, every few days, "So if everything else gets canceled, the cabin up north is still happening no matter what, right Mom?"

After mid-August, we'll have to put something else on the broad, empty, white expanse of our hall calendar, because having those things to look forward to these past few weeks has fed our souls and stabilized us a bit.

We're strapped into this wild ride for a while, you guys.  Things are not improving, indeed, with school just around the corner, and winter coming soon enough, this ride is only getting more twisty and nausea-inducing.

We could look ahead to the sharp turns and sudden drops with so much anxiety and fear.  We're debating between the terrible possible repercussions of exposing our children and teachers to great risk, or the challenge of keeping kids isolated trying to learn through screens.  We're dreading the frigid elimination of the outdoor spaces we've become so dependent on to meet our needs for connection and engagement in the world.
For me, considering both of these upcoming thresholds leads directly to projecting the complete failure of America as a nation.  The virus hijacks the next few years, destroys our economy and quarantines us from the rest of the world, the whole structure of our society crumbles, and my children inherit a dire, dystopian future. (Please scream inside your heart).

But then I remember we have a death and resurrection faith, and God is always moving, and this is part of the story, but not the whole story, and the world belongs to God.

Nicholas Kristof has an excellent opinion article this week in the New York Times called, "We interrupt this Gloom to Offer: Hope."  He talks about how our needless suffering right now may be a precursor to real change. "Perhaps today’s national pain, fear and loss can also be a source of hope: We may be so desperate, our failures so manifest, our grief so raw, that the United States can once more, as during the Great Depression, embrace long-needed changes that would have been impossible in cheerier times."

The pandemic has glaringly exposed the brokenness of our system.  "The grim awareness of national failures — on the coronavirus, racism, health care and jobs — may be a necessary prelude to fixing our country."  Fifty years of economic and healthcare policies crafted for systemic inequity have taken a terrible toll on our nation, and we've been largely indifferent, until now.
“There was something about seeing a man’s knee on another man’s neck that woke people up,” Kristof quotes Helene Gayle, the chief executive of the Chicago Community Trust.

Drawing from examples in history, he then goes on to lay out what is possible, when we've seen how bad it really is and have the motivation to build something better.  He spoke with President Jimmy Carter: “I know we will see a better future... Sometimes there must be a reckoning and course correction.” And Senator Cory Booker: “Hope right now in America is bloodied and battered, but this is the kind of hope that is successful. It’s hope that has lost its naïveté.”  Booker calls it "calloused hope" - hope that is tough and resilient.

(I highly recommend reading the whole article). 

The article shifted me back into the space of remembering that America is a long story, still being written.

But even beyond that, whole nations rise and fall, kingdoms come and go, but the story of God's world continues: death and resurrection, always redemption, always toward life.

There's no disembarking this roller coaster. But we can keep making sure there is something on the calendar to look forward to. Even if it falls off shortly.  Our naiveté is gone.  We know it's all up for grabs.  We have to hold all our plans lightly and hang on for the ride.  Our looking forward can be with dread, or with calloused hope. I choose calloused hope.

So today I lean into calloused hope, and remain ready to scream inside my heart (and over zoom with others) as the need arises.  

CONNECTING RITUAL:

Perhaps tonight before we go to bed, whatever time that is in each of our homes, we can pray in this way, and so join our souls with each other and the people of the whole earth:

I scream my fears and dread into the abyss,
You hear my cry, O Lord.

And I feed the tender shoots of hope,
with memories of your faithfulness,
with reminders of life coming from death,
with recollections of despair giving way to newness,
with gratitude
that what is dead,
and broken,
and destructive
within us,
can be rooted out,
and a new way can be planted.

Deliver us from evil.
Free us from temptation.
Feed us with the bread we need today.
Bring your Kingdom way into reality now,
that we might truly live our belonging to each other,
and find our life to you.
Give me the courage to plan for joy,
and the strength to hold plans lightly.
Give me the trust to rest in your love,
and to join in your trajectory of justice and peace.
for yours is the Kingdom, now and forever,
and in you is our hope and our future.

Amen.

Why we call it good

Daily Devotion - April 10

I will send a brief message each day (except Mondays)  while we are pausing gathering in person.
- Kara

GOOD FRIDAY

Today was a hard day in our household. We've been beaten by school and spent the day quite underwater.  I posted something personal on Facebook for the first time in two years, just expressing how hard it was. I received lovely messages of support and commiseration in response.  Because, oh yeah, we belong to each other.  

Life is hard, for all of us, right now, for a dozen different reasons.  And our struggles and reasons are bumping up against other people's struggles and reasons, and it's all a bit much sometimes.
Sometimes it's all a bit much.

Also, we are doing our best, most of us, most of the time.
So God bless us all.

Today is a special day in our faith.  Good Friday.  And I'm extra emotional about it because we won't be together singing, "Were you there when they crucified my Lord?" a cappella in the haunting darkness of the sanctuary, and quietly leaving to try to stay silent in the car all the way home.

Our rituals are all messed up this year.  But, thanks be to God, the power and message of this day transcends all our patterns and rituals.

I am grateful for our online gathering this evening. However it happens, I am grateful for the stillness that it ushers in.  I am grateful for a community with whom to retell this deep and ancient story of an improbable truth: that God comes in, that Jesus takes all our suffering, all our death, into the heart of God.

There is nothing God has not suffered:  hopes that crumble, plans that are lost, fear that rises up and comes out in tears of anguish and dread, betrayal and loss, lungs that can't get air, goodbyes unsaid and departures too soon, all we wish could be and can't, all we wish we could do but won't.  It's all held in God and swallowed in love on this day.
There is a place in our faith for hopelessness. A place for all despair.  These things belong in the story of God. They are integral to it. Today is the day for all that.
That is how this most awful of days is Good Friday.

A blessing for this day:

Still
For Good Friday

This day
let all stand still
in silence,
in sorrow.

Sun and moon
be still.

Earth
be still.

Still
the waters.

Still
the wind.

Let the ground
gape in stunned
lamentation.

Let it weep
as it receives
what it thinks
it will not
give up.

Let it groan
as it gathers
the One
who was thought
forever stilled.

Time
be still.

Watch
and wait.

Still.

—Jan Richardson
from Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons


CONNECTING RITUAL:

Perhaps, tonight before we go to bed, whatever time that is in each of our homes, we might pause, reflect, and pray in this way, and so join our hearts:

I empty my heart to you this night, O God,
holding nothing back.
Thank you that you receive what I bring.
Bring my soul to stillness.
May I rest in you.
Amen.

Praying the dangerous ones

Psalm 22

When I was learning to preach, and I would come to a text and not be able to figure out my way in, Andy was learning to be a theologian, and he would prompt me to ask a particular question of the scripture. This question, he would remind me, would surely reorient me out of whatever rabbit hole I had gone down trying to figure out what to say, and return me to the purpose of the sermon, and the bible itself.  

The question is: Who is this God? And what is God up to here?  (Two questions, really, but he’s always struggled with run-on sentences, so we're going to go with them as one).

This question has shaped my faith more than any other.  I’ve found that it opens every scripture passage, because surely every single part of the bible is trying to say something about who God is, and trying to show something about what God does.  Whether it is a historical accounting of an ancient battle, a graphic love song, a miracle of Jesus, a letter of Paul, or apocalyptic poetry, the reason it was told and written down, preserved and canonized, read and preached, is because it tells us something of who God is and what God does.

This text, in particular, is a fascinating study.  A Psalm of David, in which he spells out his utter despair and anguish, with vivid and terrible imagery, and accuses God of abandoning him, it opens with these decidedly accusatory words: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?  

It doesn’t say, MyGod, HAVE you abandoned me? 

It says WHY HAVE YOU ABANDONED ME? WHY ARE YOU SO FAR FROM HELPING ME?  

These are words to make a preacher nervous. 

If we’re asking this text, Who is this God and what is God up to? These words suggest that perhaps we must begin by answering that God has forsaken this person, that God, in fact, abandons us. God is sometimes silent to our cries. God is sometimes absent.

In the faith I grew up with, this is heresy.  If you feel like God is absent, I was told, it is because you are. You must search your heart for what is blocking your connection to God.  You must find your way back to the faithful God.  God is unchanging. God is never absent. We change. We stray.  If your prayers for help go unanswered, it is simply that you are not paying attention to the answer, or that perhaps they’ve been answered in a way you don’t like and so refuse to acknowledge.

For the first half of my life, nobody I had known, no pastor or Sunday school teacher or youth leader, no mentor or camp counselor or conference speaker, no even regular fellow Christian would have said, Yep. God sometimes goes AWOL. Yes, it’s a legitimate experience to wrestle with the very real absence of God.

And yet… and yet, not only is this in the mouth of King David, in the prayerbook of our scriptures for all generations of believers before and after Christ to read and pray, but this very prayer was in the mouth of Jesus himself as he hung dying on the cross. 

And he did not whisper it quietly under his breath, so as not to shake the faith of others.  He shouted it from the feeble depths of his suffocating lungs during his crucifixion, to be heard by his executioners and his followers alike, his enemies and his admirers.  Those who believed he was who he said he was and those who were glad to see him die for the blasphemous claim all heard him wail, My God? my God? Why have you forsaken me?

So our question, which was compelling enough to begin with, just got a lot bit juicier. 

Because if we ask, Who God is and what God is up tohere, not only is God the one doing the abandoning, but God is, apparently, also the one abandoned, screaming out the accusation against God, Why have you forsaken me?  which tells us: godforsakenness is an experience that God knows intimately in God’s own human soul, and viscerally in his own dying flesh and bones.  

I wish I had known this sooner in my life:  There is a whole aspect of our faith –going back to its very beginning, that doesn’t pretend things are fine when they are not. That doesn’t pretend God is near when God is not. That doesn’t pretend to be ok when you are not.  

What time had I ever spent with the Psalms of disorientation? When had I ever read all the way through this Psalm, without skimming past the drama of it?  I had never let in the deeply embodied, visceral anguish, the dark imagery that resorts to metaphor to communicate such deep despair and soul torment of total abandonment and absolute desolation.  

You guys, this is in our bible. This is our scripture. There are prayers in our bible that articulate feeling completely cut off from God, from others, from your very self, with no agency, just helpless dejection, watching your life disappear before your eyes and God not lifting a finger to stop it.

And the fact that this scripture was cried out by Jesus himselfas he hung dying tells me two things.

1-    that it’s ok to feel this way.  That to suffer in this way and tell God and even whomever will listen, is a valid human experience. And

2-   that to have this scripture there, this prayer at the ready, gave Jesus comfort. He was able to reach for these words, to cry out these words, because they were available to him. When he felt like this he knew he could draw from words written generations before and prayed throughout his childhood by his community, When they felt this way and they cried out to God, I can do the same. 

What a gift available to us that we do not grab hold of!

What is God up to? 

If God’s goal in coming as Jesus was to save us all from our sin and sadness and give us promises of triumph, and guarantees against pain and misery– then for Jesus to cry this out while he is dying is dreadfully undermining to his whole message.  What weakness that seems to declare to the whole world that you were wrong all along! That when it came down to the end of it, God wasn’t there for you after all, but abandoned you.  

But if Jesus’ message is that absolute connection to God and each other is possible, is, in fact, what we are already given by God, so much so that I can take even my anger at God, even my abandonment by God, even my very accusations and disappointment over God’s apparent lack of care, and I can shout it at God, even in front of other people, and it cannot end things between us, it cannot stop God from being God or me from belonging to God, what a powerful moment of truth this is.  

It is as though God is saying, I cannot enter in and be fully human until I have also experienced completely what it is to be cut off from God, to be lost, to be alone and afraid, hopeless and helpless.  And then Jesus does, Jesus dies.  And God indeed ceases to be God with us, ceases, in fact, to be God.  The Father is not the Father without the Son. The Spirit, which is the energy of the Father to the Son, cannot bewithout the Son.  The total annihilation of the Trinity comes when death enters in and separates what cannot be separated.  

But then the one who breathes life into being from nothing brings life even from the nothingness of death.  Life prevails over death, and now there is no division, no alienation, no abandonment, or suffering, or misery that we have ever, or will ever face, that is not known intimately, shared completely by our God. Death does not have the final word.  And no matter how dark our darkness, no matter how terrible our suffering, it is not the final story, or the defining story, of our life.  “The worst thing is not the last thing,” is how Buechner said it.  Another way is, “If you’re not okay, it’s not the end.” (Alice Conner)

So it turns out that the very real experience of godforsakenness is paradoxically the very place we find God. And if we are working hard to prop up our faith and correct our attitude, adjust to our circumstances with a cheerful disposition and stuff down or avoid any anguish we may feel, if we are trying to get through the godforsakenness pretending to be ok when we are not ok, we are missing God right where God is – on the cross, bearing our suffering with and for us.  

But when we let go of trying to preserve God’s reputation and our own status as “faithful,” and come instead to a place of utter honesty, there God can be near to us, there God can find us.

In my own life, when I lost home and family, and all the belonging I had known and the structures that made life make sense, when all I thought I could trust in fell apart, something something in me broke open.  It was the first time in my whole life I was not in control. The first time I did not filter my feelings through my mind first, through others’ perceptions, through my beliefs and my principles and correctness. I just let go. I threw it all on God, threw it back to God. I yelled obscenities at God and told God that I had lost all respect for God, and that as far as things between God and me, I was done.  I broke up with God.  God had forsaken me; God had forsaken all of humanity, I decided, by allowing such suffering to beset us all, and God was not to be trusted.

I had no idea this kind of backtalk to God was so legitimate a part of faith that Jesus himself had done likewise.

But here’s what is so marvelous about all of this- about the whole damn thing of it: this Psalm does what all these psalms of disorientation do – it turns the corner back to trust.  Inexplicably, and quite suddenly, it shifts from helpless, abject despair and blame, to effusive praise and thanksgiving, empowered trust and sheer delight.  

When we ask the question again at the second half of this Psalm, Who is this God and what is God up to?  the Psalmist tells us, God did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; he did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him.  The poor will eat and be satisfied, he says, God’s power and love and deliverance and dominion reaches to the very ends of the earth and encompasses all people everywhere, even those not yet alive. 

And just like in life, we don’t get to see what makes the switch. We don’t get to witness what resurrection looks like when it is happening.  Just like we don’t get to see what goes on when the dead Jesus reanimates; we just see the inexplicably empty tomb and the living breathing Lord walking among them.  

It’s not something we can grasp, this life out of death thing. It’s mystery, transcendence, something outside ourselves that we cannot muster up or break down. There are no steps we take to be transformed. Only openness and honesty, and waiting with our hands outstretched, or even clenched tight. 

Because it is not we who do it, but the Holy Spirit.  

It is God – this same God we’ve accused of abandoning us – who comes in, when all is said and done, bringing redemption and life and hope.  In the very, very end, life and love win, no matter what.  And this is true even now. If we let ourselves be where Jesus is, in the raw realness of our lives, God willdo this.  God will bring life out of the death of us.  God will bring hope out of the despair of us. 

Who is this God and what is God up to?

Always this. Always here.  Alongside us even in our godforsakeness. At work in the midst of death to bring new life.

Come back to the scene and watch again as Jesus shouts these words from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And not only does godforsakenness get taken up into God, but the imagination of every God-fearing person who hears him ignites and recalls the Psalm they had prayed together through a lifetime, and their ancestors before them.  

Time slows down and folds in on itself into timelessness as it sinks in, vast and beyond comprehension, the intimate words prayed by King David 1000 years before, I can count all my ribs, my mouth sticks to my jaws, my hands and feet shrivel, they laugh and mock, let your God save you! They stare and gloat over me, they cast lots for my clothing… Jesus Christ lives them now. 

As he cries out the first line to this Psalm, his body wasting away under the crude sign, “King of the Jews,” beyond what is unfolding before them, their memories go on to recall the rest of the prayer to its completion, All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord; and all the families of the nations shall worship before him. For dominion belongs to the Lord, and he rules over the nations.  To him, indeed, shall all who sleep in the earth bow down; before him shall bow all who go down to the dust, and I shall live for him. Posterity will serve him; future generations will be told about the Lord, and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn, saying that God has done it.

And in the paradox of a godforsaken and supposedly failed savior being put to death in front of them, a new Kingdom is simultaneously being proclaimed that reaches back to redeem an ancient praying poet king centuries before, and reaches forward to touch generations yet unborn, and reaches beyond this people to all nations, and every family, and each person who sleeps in the whole earth, and reaches from the real experiences of a lived life through death and beyond it, to eternity.

There is no death –of self, or dreams, or even our mortal bodies - stronger than the life and love of God.  We need not fear.  We will fear, but we need not. And when we do, we can yell that out to God too.

Because there is nothing, nothing that you cannot say to God.  

And there is no experience so dark, so terrible, so godforsaken, that God does not bear it with us.  

Thank you, David. 

Thank you prayers of our scriptures.

Thank you, Psalms of Disorientation and all who have prayed them before us, for giving us words when we are too timid or too tongue-tied to go there on our own.  

Take us to the feet of God and leave us there, and see what God will do with us.

Amen.

This is the third of a four part series on the spirituality of the Psalms.  

You can read the rest here: 

Part 1 - A life well-lived

Part 2 - Starting and ending this way

Part 4 - Telling the stories that change us

Entering Lent

In honor of Ash Wednesday approaching this week, I am reposting last year's Ash Wednesday Reflection. Enjoy.

image by Jan Richardson, used with permission

When I told Owen about Ash Wednesday, and making a cross on our forehead, he said, “But I already have a cross on my forehead.” 

He was speaking of his baptism. That he is marked as Christ’s own and claimed by God forever.  But his baptism was a baptism into the life, death and resurrection of Christ, that his very being is now taken up into the life of Christ – the death of Christ, the redemption of Christ.

And every experience he has in this life of death, each loss and pain he suffers and inflicts on others, each time something is taken from his being, each brokenness, each injustice – these things are all taken into Christ who bears them all on the cross.

So, I told him, “This time the cross we make on our forehead is one we can see. It is marked in ashes.  It represents death – Jesus’ death, but our own too. Because we are going into Lent, where we talk about how death has a hold on life, and how we participate in death, and how we all really need God’s life to destroy death.” 

He looked at me and touched his forehead and said, ‘Will you think of Grandma Root when you make your cross on your head?” 

“Yes, I will think of her," I answered, "because she is gone from us and death has separated her from us, and I will think of all the other ways that death separates us from each other. The ways death hurts us in life. Because when we spend some time remembering this, we know that even though death makes a mark on us, we belong to God and that can never change.  And we will be ready to talk about how God destroys death and brings life.”

We go into these next weeks, these 40 days of Lent following Jesus’ journey to the cross, and it helps us remember why.

Why do we celebrate the resurrection anyway?

Why does it matter that we have a God who died for us?

Why do we believe there is any hope in the story of Christ, in God’s story that we are part of? 

And we cannot know the hope, taste the promise, unless we are willing to really face the despair, unless we are willing to spend some time in the shadow side of life: 

the unanswered prayers, 

the guilt over relationships shattered 

and dreams traded away 

and promises broken 

and wounds gouged deep into our souls 

and inflicted on others by our own words or actions. 

Last week after Grandma Root’s funeral, Owen sat in the car holding his popped balloon that he had been playing with the whole day.  He finally sighed a big sigh and said, “Mommy, why are bad things happening?  Why does everything die?  Did God do a bad job making the world?” 

These are Lent questions.  

And too often we rush to answers instead of sitting in the questions.  

Lent gives us a chance to simmer in the questions.

Why do bad things happen? 

Why does everything have to die?  

Why did Jesus die?  

Why is the cross "good news"? 

We can’t know it to be good news until we spend some time in the bad, until we let ourselves stop faking or fearing, stop defending God and ourselves, stop ignoring our complicity and looking past the shame in our lives. 

Lent is an invitation to honesty.

It is a chance to clear away some of the noise- as cheerful or friendly or positive as the noise might be- to get rid of the distractions that protect us from having to face the doubts or the anger, the deep sadness or the piercing regrets.  It is an invitation to enter those things, as fearful as it sounds, to sit with those things and expect that God will encounter us. 

Lent is a time when we acknowledge sin and evil, and our participation in sin and evil, and recognize that we don’t deserve forgiveness but we stand here in need of it anyway,

It is a time when say we have a whole lot of questions and concerns about how the world is run and how life is going, and we are not going to hide them or explain them away; we’re going to swallow our fear and say them outloud, even if they seem too big to fix,

Lent is when we say from dust I came and to dust I will return, ashes to ashes, and we stare death in the face, and admit that we are unable to save ourselves or the world around us, and that we need a savior.

In Lent we stand with our flimsy faith drawn on our foreheads in ashes, of all things, and say as crazy a story as this is, as hard as it is to see hope sometimes,

I am going to risk it,

even with my doubt and my unfaithfulness and my hypocrisy and my self-righteousness, I stand here in the possibility that there might be more going on than I can see, and that redemption may be more real than I can imagine.

So we surrender ourselves to the story, our story, God’s story - that moves now through life’s horror and illusion and brings the Creator ultimately to death at the hands of his own creation and most astonishingly, on its behalf,

we submit ourselves to this story because in this story there might be a hope beyond what we can grasp, and we’re willing to risk letting it grasp us.

So we begin Lent today that we might be made ready for Easter. 

We begin Lent today that our eyes might be opened and our pain might rise to the surface, that our guilt might become obvious to us, that the world’s utter need might stand starkly before us – because there is a promise at the end of this journey,

and we can’t hear the promise in all its cosmic, world-changing power with all the religion and politics and business as usual in our ears,

and we can’t see the promise’s searing brilliance past all the self-importance and busyness, and personal agendas clouding our vision,

and we wont be able to really let the hope of our salvation wash over us, fill us, cleanse us and sustain us if our backs are turned because we’re too occupied being strong, or good, or right.

Lent prepares us for the good news of Easter. 

Bring your questions.  Bring your fears.  Bring your failures.

Lent is an invitation. 

May we accept it.